I agree with Malan about totems, its the macros that allow pet classes to kill a totem instantly with no GCD or drawback that makes it unbalanced. Druids moonfiring, or even casters wanding totems or shadow word deathing them is fine because it costs them time or mana or a gcd, or even a relevant cooldown.

The pet thing is ridiculous because it doesn't cause the person thats using the macro to interrupt what they are doing or slow them down or inconvenience them in anyway at all. They don't have to target the totem, click on it, or stop anything or even be anywhere near the damn thing.

Shaman tends to be less represented in high rankings for arenas than other classes. Now there are two theories as to why that might be: either good players just happen to not play shaman, or playing a shaman is a barrier to being a good player.

I look at it like this. Muggsy Bogues made the NBA at 5' 3". So being short doesn't make you non-viable as a NBA player. That doesn't mean it's not a handicap either, I think it's a fairly widely accepted fact that being tall helps as a basketball player.

There's no way to prove that playing a hunter, shaman or paladin is like trying to break into the NBA as a short person. Maybe it's true that people are discouraged by them not being the flavor of the month and play something else. However, does the argument that "short people see everyone in the NBA is tall and decide not to try" sound like an adequate explanation as to why basketball is dominated by tall people? It doesn't to me, and likewise the class choice argument feels week to me in explaining why we see so few of some classes and so many of others at the top.

New Changes according to World of Raids.

• Improved Shields - The amount of mana gained from your Water Shield orbs is now 10% for all 3 ranks.
• Mental Quickness description changed - Reduces the mana cost of your instant cast spells by 2/4/6% and increases your spell damage and healing (was spell power) by an amount equal to 10/20/30% of your attack power.
• Shamanistic Rage - Chance to regenerate mana lowered from 30% to 15%. New: Reduces all damage taken by 30% and gives your successful melee attacks a chance to regenerate mana equal to 15% of your attack power. Lasts 15 sec.
• Feral Spirit - The 2 Summoned Spirit Wolves now last 30 seconds (instead of 45 seconds).

source

Few things wrong there.

1. Improved Shields wouldn't make any sense for it not to improve Water Shield as well as the other two.

2. There is no damage/healing stat in WoLK, there is only spell power.

When the NYI is off of the doggies then I will worry about their duration.

Wrong. There are still Talents that only affect spelldamage or healing.

Improve Shields will still improve Water Shield, only that now is 10/10/10% instead of 5/10/15% (which I think was last build).

Spell damage & Healing? Wtf? so they implement a new stat to make things easy, but then they change a talent to the old ways? Sounds the dumbest thing ever, even dumbest than my own posts...

Unless... they want to implement this build on live, before they change to spellpower... maybe is the build they plan to implement just before WotLK to allow people change itemization (with the changes to AP and so on)... but that's stupid as well, there's still a lot of time till WotLK and they would need to revert ALL talents with Spellpower on their tooltips... not just one...

Blizzard, when I thought you could not surprise me anymore, you come up with this...

It is 10% per talent point for water shield and 5% per point for lightning and earth shield.

So that would be 10/20/30% for water shield and 5/10/15% for earth and lightning.

Blizzards descriptions are often very confusing and nonintuitive.

The point is that it effects your spelldamage for a full 100% but the healing effect dropped by roughly 50% (spellpower = 1 spell damage or 1.9 healing). This to make the 0/28/43 healing spec less viable.

Weird thing in this all is that paladins have the same talent, Sheat of Light, but that is still spellpower, it even has a strong 2nd bonus. 60% of a crit heal is applied as HoT on your target. This talent has a 20 ret point minimum, where Mental Quickness has a 25 enh point minimum. For a paladin it is twice (including the 2nd bonus even more) as effective when you heal then for a shaman.

The difference between Conviction and Thundering strikes is also weird, Pallies get +5% crit to melee attacks and spells where shamans get+5% to attacks.

Well, seeing as the "Source" World of Raids is using, is the Offical blizz calc, I'd take anything there with a heavy grain of salt. They have time and again had errors in both their betacalcs and in the live, so I wouldn't pay much heed to this at all.

I don't understand that.

Does not spellpower affect your damage and your healing equally? I thought that was the point why they said they were going to raise the base healing of healing spells. So unifying spellpower would be easier to manage.

If spellpower gives different amounts to damage and healing, then why bother? It would be only a name change.

But maybe I misunderstood and that is what it really is... If it is this way is completely absurd...

Well, he said we won´t double our AP, but the increase is really significant, especially for people like me, who have no TX-items, but full badge/ZA gear.
I have now 1620 AP and will loose roughly 100 via strength and gain 600 from agility + 300 from intellect. So I end up with about 2400 AP without regemming (which I will do of course). Thats 1/3 gain of total AP for "free"...now, I think thats an awful lot.

To get away from the pointless PvP-debate, lets put togehther what I really would like to know before the new talents hit the game:

- Static Shock - I don´t doubt it will be worth the points in the end, but let´s say talents get into the game before they launch the addon.I find myself to choose between Maelstrom Weapon + ED (which will be most effectiv at 75+ with Lava Burst) and leave Static Shock at 70. For a small raid like ZA I would think MW+ED is more effectiv than Static Shock, even without Lava Burst at level 70
- Mealstrom Weapon - There have been some statements who said it would also affect healing spells. Is that really true at the current state of the Beta?? I mean, think about it in terms of leveling...our viability would be taken a little bit too far in my eyes
- The question came up before, but I haven´t found an answer: If Elemental Focus + Shamanistic Focus together heavily reduce your mana costs for the next shock (after you cast Lava Burst), do you really need it? Is mana an issue in the beta? We "loose" Mana Shield and have a higher use for mana (reduced SS cooldown, more casts via MW). Still something not to worry about? I would like to hear some impressions on that from people who are in the beta.

All together I really like all the changes...but i still doubt that they will give us so much more dps in the end. Let´s hope I´m wrong, but + 30%AP, +20% Haste, +always Agi-totem..that alone will make up for +30% damage overall (no proven numbers here, just a good guess), despite the -3% hitrating and the loss of some critrating. And improved Stormstrike + Static Shock + regular Lava Burst casts are there too to improve our damage.
I wonder (and fear) that they maybe just put in everything to test the stuff and than leave us with maybe half of it...we are still hybrids, buff an awful lot to party members and can heal...to get us in line with the top DD classes still seems to good to be true...

@Tana.

It is right now: base healing + healpower an items

It will be: base healing + 1.9 x spellpower on items

So (it is said) nothing will change in the effectiveness of your healing spells. There is some concern
with a few talents, but maybe that will be adjustet...we are still in the beta

Ok here we are. No weapon imbue but still flurry procs. And I just realized that I'm wearing a scryer pendant of might which adds zero, one or two arcane strikes per try. /facepalm

I have a fairly small dataset but let's try with it:

Average proc number is 5.89 and PPM (5.89/15*60) = 23.56

If I remove the two extrema (2 and 11 procs), it gives us an average of 5.71 procs and PPM is 22.84.

(I'm not sure about my PPM computation...)

How new talents/spells will scale in wotlk?

Lavaburst give huge base damage boost but how does it scale with gear.
8s CD
Spell power coef is huge pain to calculate:
[(2 / 3.5) * 1.05 * 1.1 * 1.06 * 1.1* 1.05 * 1.5] -(0.13025 * * 1.05 * 1.1 * 1.06 * 1.1* 1.05 * 1.5)
Cast time coef * misery * CoE * call of flame * imp. scorch * concussion * Crit - flame shock dot * multpliers...
... = 1.0278

We gain 0.3 spell power per ap.

+1ap = +x lavaburst dps
0.3 * 1.0278 * 1/8 = 0.0385dps per ap from LvB.
or 39dps per 1000ap.
Rather low if this is only *new* button to rotation. Also Lvb totally ignore crit scaling. Best thing is +9% crit from elemental devastion.

I don't like suggest ideas much but I hope blizzard make LvB slower cast time spell and give elemental tree talent to lower that. Bigger base damage(+20%) and 3s cast time(+20%). Then put LvB cast time reduction to Lightning mastery(0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0,5) and rename it to bolt mastery. This change make LvB actual useful in elemental shaman rotation and boost enhancement scaling a little bit.

Edit:
[
Using LvB every 8s with 3 Fs dot is imposible. Only two dot tick drop Coef even more. LvB coef when eating 2 dot ticks is only 0.85
(Lbv 0s, Fs 1.5s, Fs dot 4.5s, Fs dot 7,5s, LvB 8s)
Using LvB in every cd might turn even dps loss.
]

Another rant:
Static shock scaling is fine. It's use all melee stats but crit(flurry uptime maybe?) to scale.
This talent would make even more use if it would proc others shields too.

Example: 3/3 Static shield
Mini shamanist rage and pvp tool. Not huge change but fit better with improved shields talent in enhancement tree.

World of Warcraft Arena Ranking | SK Gaming
The top 100 teams in all battlegroups, all realms, all regions and all setups show the following in representation:

Basically at the moment you have the overpowered classes;
20% (+20%) Warrior
19% (+19%) Druid
18% (+18%) Rogue


The balanced classes;
13% (+13%) Warlock
12% (+12%) Priest
8% (+8%) Mage


And of course, the lesser classes;
5% (+5%) Shaman
4% (+4%) Paladin
1% (+1%) Hunter

The numbers speak for themselves, denying the numbers helps no one.

Representation does not equal viability and this conversation is stupid.

How about "People will always choose the path of least resistance" does that answer that for you? Hopefully it does and we can all shut up about this (me included).

Viability: it is possible to do well.
Accessibility: it is EASIER to do well.

You'd HAVE to fix viability. It's NICE to fix accessibility, but not at the expense of other classes' viability. We're already shredding warlocks/priests, skill-locking them, eating their spells. The only counter they have is fear. I think any proposal that removes the ability for a skilled player to eliminate (with only 50% success, mind you) our fear defeat could possibly decrease that class' viability.

When looking at these numbers, let's also not forget that shaman is an underrepresented class in wow in general, making up about 7% of the total population, druids 8%. By contrast, hunter and rogue are about 12% or so each.

If you reorder this according to population, I think you'll find druids are massively overrepresented, hunters massively underrepresented, and shamans are a little underrepresented. Not worthy of a massive reset, the new totem protector is just what the doctor ordered.

ALSO: Promise this is the last time I bring this up. I know a lot of very successful PvP shaman. My skill is a shadow of theirs. I don't blame this on my class.

Thanks for the info, but since Malan said it is still the old 30% mana back from SR on the betaservers, any verdict on our mana regeneration are moot.

I said before that I expect a severe mana shortage, if spellcosts don't go done significantly and this nerf also goes through. Especially in 5man and 10man content, where there might not be all raidbuffs are present, this will become an issue.

MMO Champ keeps releasing these supposed "Beta Changes" solely based on a change on the WoW talent calculator. Nothing they've updated for shaman in the last 2 "updates" has actually made it onto the beta servers.

I'd suggest ignoring most of what they say until it actually makes it onto a server.

I'm still wondering what sort of stat decay there is past 70 for hit, crit, agi, int, haste. The only documented change i have seen is @70 it now takes 40 AGI/1% crit

I have never posted before but when I saw your comment I had to check into something.

Either your armory is way off, or you are just making crap up. You have 1232 AP *WITH* kings. Full badge and ZA gear? Um. No. You have a ZA helm, and a couple peices of badge gear. I am not going to count your weapons... as... wow.

With your stats like that, you will lose ~ 178 AP from strength, and gain ~ 282 from agility and ~ 300 from intellect. You are not going to go from 1620 to 2400AP. You are going to go from 1232 to 1636 AP. A decent buff.